(1) This is a true-crime sort of narrative non-fiction account of a toxic fog that beset London in the early 1950's - the first year of QE2's reign. The story is paralleled with a London serial killer who strangled prostitutes in the fog (no, not Jack the Ripper) and hid them under hs floorboards (no, it's not an Edgar Allan Poe story) but despite occurring around the same time frame the two stories had NOTHING to do with one another. I mean; nothing - so the whole context felt forced.

The book toggles between these two unrelated storylines rather unsuccessfully. It becomes more and more clear that linking the two is a real stretch. There are some nice human interest stories of families affected by the fog and some interesting info about coal and pollution and how disgusting the fog actually was - the inside of cloth masks was brown after a few hours from all the particulate matter being inhaled and exhaled. The serial killer storyline - John Reginald Christie - was macabre and bizarre with all the weird false confessions. How could his wife not have known what a creep he was? But on the whole, the writing was pedestrian and the biggest complaint -- it seems like two separate books. Both stories, while tragic, are not that complex which is probably why she conflated them in one book. But there really was no larger message.

The whole experience of reading this was a bit of a chore. No real mystery or dramatic tension or an object lesson necessarily. I think intriguing to explore the beginnings of government's role in stemming pollution and the political divides that existed between liberal and conservative from early on, even across the pond. But overall -- this was just OK for me. ( )

Two deadly stories that played out in London in 1952. Over the course of several days, the city was covered in a thick layer of smoky fog, condensed into a new word, "smog". The smog was so thick that people could hardly see in front of them, and spending any amount of time in the smog resulted in death for an estimated 12,000 people.
At the same time, a resident of Notting Hill, at the time a slum area of London, was luring women into the flat he shared with his wife. John Reginald Christie was a serial killer whose home, 10 Rillington, has gone down in infamy as the site where so many women, plus an infant and his own wife of 30 years, met their end at the hands of a fussy loser.
Winkler Dawson is always an amazing researcher, unearthing even the tiniest detail, so if you've read about either story before, you're likely to find a lot you hadn't come across before. She even interviewed a 102 year-old who was a patrolman during these events. When it comes to all the Parliament discourse over the smog and the fighting about it's cause and what to do about it, the story drags, but this was the author's first book. I'm a fan of her various podcasts and she can tell a story. ( )

In the depths of a bitter 1952 winter, an anticyclone arrived over London that enveloped the city in fog for about a week. The noxious fumes from households and industry formed a huge smog cloud which killed thousands of people.

Around the same time, serial killer John Reginald Christie was going about his evil work.

The problem with this book is that the author tries too hard to connect these events, trying to beat up what is no more than an interesting piece of synchronicity. Her determination to do this even leads her to absurdities like describing the smog as a "mass murderer", as if the weather had independent agency and could form an intent to kill people.

I did not know anything about the 1952 smog disaster, and it certainly merits a book all on its own without an attempt to jazz it up by inserting an unrelated true crime element, which only detracts from the work overall. ( )

This book was engaging. However, the book spends most of its pages on the Great London Smog and considerably less on the the serial killer Christie; probably a 70/30 split. Beyond the shared trope of murder occurring alongside a major historical event, its tone, pace, and switching points of view reminds me a lot of The Devil in the White City by Eric Larson. ( )

The book would have been better if it had been 2 separate books: one about the deadly smog over London and one about the mass murderer. ( )